Ho, Lethal Companions! Put down your airhorns, let fall your precious armfuls of plastic fish, and prick up your freakin’ ears. Something is coming to 2023’s breakout horror multiplayer game. Something that will make the music boxes and springhead marionettes look like child’s playthings! I mean, like the child’s playthings they already look like, but without the parts that make them horrifying. That something is… to be announced, but I considered the below teaser text pithy enough to be worth a shout regardless.
“The new creature is technically maybe the most powerful creature in the game, and the power easily goes to its head,” explains appallingly young developer Zeekerss on social media. “Sometimes it does things that make absolutely no sense, just because it can.”
There is an infinity of enigma couched within the words “sometimes it does things that make absolutely no sense”. There are countless things in Lethal Company that defy sense-making, not least the game’s players, who repeatedly land on emaciated moons populated by giant spiders and ghost girls to harvest rubber duckies and V-type engines, which they then feed to a mouth in a wall. I look forward to experiencing how Zeekerss plans to raise the stakes.
In general, I like the idea of an entity deliberately deciding to do things that seem nonsensical. When we encounter this in other games, we tend to call it an error, depending on our flexible understanding of where the border between sense and nonsense lies. I’ve always enjoyed reading forum thread attempts to reach across the line and redefine “purely” errant behaviour as plausible. For example, weaving a little mythology around the fact that horses in Skyrim are able to witness crimes. It’s because every horse in Tamriel is descended from Horseplay, God of Tattletaling.
Lethal Company’s thunder has been stolen by, amongst others, the recent R.E.P.O., with its “Jim Henson does Nier Automata” characters. Still, it remains a grand and very sociable anti-capitalist chiller. I’m deeply thankful to Zeekerss for engineering a genre of extraction game in which the extraction process is fundamentally cursed. On which note, this news article is now over – please gather up your airhorns and plastic fish and get back to the ship, pronto. Does anybody hear giggling?